The present invention generally relates to drug testing methods for determining maternal drug use during pregnancy and fetal exposure to drugs in utero. More particularly, it relates to a new and improved method for extracting drug of abuse analytes from meconium to provide a concentrated meconium extract for use in immunoassay screening procedures and quantitative determinations.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,326,708, granted Jul. 5, 1994, a new and improved method for obtaining non-aqueous concentrated cocktail meconium extracts containing substantially all of any drugs of abuse target analytes present in a meconium sample was described. The method described in this patent demonstrated that an organic extraction procedure yielded a dramatically improved sensitivity in comparison with earlier aqueous-based and methanol-based extraction methods.
The present invention provides an improvement over the invention described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,326,708.